How Can UX Workshops Help Define Your Product and Lower Development Costs?

Inventors, owners and product managers often have a good overview of the application they want to build. They come up with functionalities, solutions to their customer's concerns, and even rudimentary design cues.

The difficulty lies that these initial ideas often come from a single person unrelated to design and are not readily translatable into an application or in defining concepts that are sometimes not specific enough to become digital products.

How to get out of this situation with a winning hand?

It is where UX workshops come to the rescue. It is a sound method to streamline the creative process before designing and creating a product and to identify possible errors.

What is a UX workshop?

UX workshops are intensive problem-solving and progress-oriented gatherings dedicated to addressing a specific issue throughout a project. Workshops bring participants together to focus on generating ideas and practical measures to achieve the desired outcome.

Simply put, a UX workshop is a series of diverse group activities led by a facilitator and held in an isolated physical or virtual location. Their duration can range from a handful of minutes to several days, as in the case of a Design Sprint. A UX workshop involves a team of people – one facilitator called a facilitator and up to 10 people with diverse knowledge and expertise.

How does a UX workshop help during the initial phase of product design?

UX workshops are beneficial early on for the following reasons:

• They help define and narrow down the user persona,
• They help identify precisely a user's problems in existing solutions,
• They prioritize functionality and its impact on UX, as not everything can or should be built right away,
• They help create a user journey or desired user behaviour,
• They help identify potential functionality issues,
• They even help understand the marketing side of a product through activities such as composing an Elevator Pitch.

How do UX workshops help designers and reduce development costs?

UX workshops are beneficial for designers for the following reasons:

• Proprietors better understand their product,
• Designers who often attend UX workshops better understand the product with all its complexities,
• Good planning helps narrow down estimates for both design and development,
• A team can identify potential issues quickly – long before a product undergoes a development process,
• Troubleshooting in the design phase is much faster and cheaper than in the development phase.

Conclusion

It is wise to spend a day or two at a UX workshop to better grasp the product concept and find common ground with the design team.

The cost of a UX workshop is manifold lower than today's popular YOLO approach, which is to start building a product without defining and understanding it.

And what type are you? A designer with a YOLO mindset or a manager who keeps their feet firmly on the ground?